The Question of Bruno

by Aleksandar Hemon

In this stylistically adventurous, brilliantly funny tour de force-the most highly acclaimed debut since Nathan Englander's-Aleksander Hemon writes of love and war, Sarajevo and America, with a skill and imagination that are breathtaking.

A love affair is experienced in the blink of an eye as the Archduke Ferdinand watches his wife succumb to an assassin's bullet. An exiled writer, working in a sandwich shop in Chicago, adjusts to the absurdities of his life. Love letters from war torn Sarajevo navigate the art of getting from point A to point B without being shot. With a surefooted sense of detail and life-saving humor, Aleksandar Hemon examines the overwhelming events of history and the effect they have on individual lives. These heartrending stories bear the unmistakable mark of an important new international writer.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, The United States Of America, Historical Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published April 6, 2000

About the author

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian American writer known for his short stories and novels that explore issues of exile, identity, and home through characters drawn from Hemon’s own experience as an immigrant.

Hemon was raised in Sarajevo, where his father was an engineer and his mother was an accountant. After graduating from the University of Sarajevo with a degree in literature in 1990, he worked as a journalist with the Sarajevan youth press. In 1992 he participated in a journalist exchange program that took him to Chicago. Hemon intended to stay in the United States only briefly, for the duration of the program, but, when war broke out in his home country, he applied for and was granted status as a political refugee in the United States.

In Chicago Hemon worked a series of jobs, including as a bike messenger and a door-to-door canvasser, while improving his knowledge of English and pursuing a graduate degree at Northwestern University. Three years after arriving in the United States, he wrote his first short story in English, “The Sorge Spy Ring.” Together with several other short stories and the novella “Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls,” it was published in the collection The Question of Bruno in 2000, the same year Hemon became an American citizen. Like much of Hemon’s published work, these stories were largely informed by Hemon’s own immigrant experience in Chicago. Hemon brought back Jozef Pronek, the protagonist from his earlier novella, with Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies (2002), the story of a young man growing up in Sarajevo who later attempts to navigate a new life in Chicago while working minimum-wage jobs. The book, like the rest of Hemon’s work, was notable for the author’s inventive use of the English language. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2004.

The Lazarus Project (2008) intertwined two stories of eastern European immigrants to Chicago. Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian immigrant writer and the novel’s narrator, becomes obsessed with a murder case from nearly a century earlier in which Lazarus Averbuch, a young Russian Jew, was shot and killed by Chicago’s police chief. Hemon received much critical acclaim for the novel, which was a finalist for a National Book Award. He followed this with Love and Obstacles (2009), a collection of short stories narrated by a young man who leaves Sarajevo for the United States when war breaks out in his home country. The Making of Zombie Wars (2015) chronicles the quotidian difficulties of a workaday writer attempting to finish a screenplay about a zombie invasion.

Hemon also cowrote the screenplay for The Matrix Resurrections (2021), the fourth installment in the popular sci-fi Matrix series. His other works included the memoirs The Book of My Lives (2013) and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You (2019). The latter book consists of two volumes.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

IL MONDO E TUTTO CIÒ CHE CONTIENE



Breve (meno di duecento pagine) raccolta di racconti (otto) che rappresenta l’esordio di Aleksandar Hemon, nato a Sarajevo, a ventotto anni vincitore di una borsa di studio che per sua fortuna lo portò a Chicago subito prima che iniziasse il mostruoso assedio della sua città. Per sua fortuna, perché da allora le sorti di Sarajevo e della guerra (fratricida) balcanica ha potuto seguirli a distanza, sullo schermo della sua televisione e sulle pagine dei giornali.
Col tempo è riuscito a far arrivare, in parte in Canada in parte in US, il resto della sua famiglia.
Hemon scrive in inglese, la lingua del paese d’accoglienza, per la quale sembra avere una vera e propria passione.



Le otto storie seguono il percorso biografico dello stesso Hemon.
Si parte dall’origine del suo cognome, molto poco bosniaco: e infatti si apprende che probabilmente origina dalla Bretagna per poi passare nella Galizia ucraina e infine approdare in Bosnia, in particolare a Sarajevo; si legge del piccolo Aleksandar che nella Jugoslavia di Tito, convinto che il maresciallo avesse occhi e orecchie ovunque e tutto potesse seguire su schermi domestici, giocava a fare la spia, a nascondersi dove le microtelecamere non avrebbero potuto riprenderlo, convinto che i frequenti viaggi del padre testimoniassero il suo lavoro di spia. Contemporaneamente, avvalendosi di mega note, Hemon ripercorre la vera carriera della super spia Richard Sorge, che rivelò a Stalin l’invasione tedesca ma non fu creduto, e terminò la sua esistenza impiccato dai giapponesi nel 1943, in piena guerra.
Le spie ricorrono nel titolo della traduzione italiana, mentre l’originale è The Question of Bruno: né l’uno né l’altro titolo si trovano in cima a uno degli otto racconti.



Il Maresciallo, alias Tito, muore nel 1980. Segue il decennio dell’espansione dei nazionalismi che porterà ai massacri e agli orrori degli anni Novanta. C’è un cameraman occidentale che riprende tutto, c’è una giovane montatrice bosniaca, ci sono i cani che diventano sempre più randagi e mangiano i gatti e aggrediscono i bambini e i vecchi, e servono da bersaglio per il tirassegno dei cecchini, in grado di fulminare una persona non solo per strada, all’aperto, ma anche al chiuso della sua casa, attraverso le finestre.

Il racconto più lungo porta il protagonista da Sarajevo agli Stati Uniti, invitato da una qualche organizzazione culturale: più o meno quello è successo ad Aleksandar.
E così Pronek-Aleksandar riesce a evitare l’assedio della sua città perché parte per gli US prima che i cecchini e le bombe inizino il loro lungo lavoro di morte.
Pronek-Aleksandar finisce col restare a Chicago, nonostante il freddo becco: segue le sorti di Sarajevo in tv nei telegiornali. Passa da un buco di casa all’altro, da un mediocre lavoro a uno pessimo.
Nel ’96 Sarajevo è finalmente libera. La sua famiglia è rimasta intrappolata in città, ma sono vivi: Pronek-Aleksandar fa ritorno per una visita, alla fine della quale non vorrebbe più ripartire, ma invece prende l’aereo e raggiunge Chicago.



Anni di trasformazione del paese – la Jugoslavia – e di trasformazioni personali e dei propri affetti: dall’innocenza dei primi anni di vita, alla perdita di identità e della stessa innocenza della gioventù, travolti da eventi storici che schiacciano, quando non dilaniano.
Qui e là Hemon m’è parso ancora acerbo, teso all’effetto (più spesso comico) che alla sostanza. Ma si tratta di sensazione passeggera, Spie di dio è una buona lettura.


L’assedio di Sarajevo durò 1425 giorni, dal 5 aprile 1992 al 29 febbraio 1996.Si stima che durante l'assedio le vittime siano state più di 12.000, i feriti oltre 50.000, l'85% dei quali tra i civili. A causa dell'elevato numero di morti e della migrazione forzata, nel 1995 la popolazione si ridusse a 334.664 unità, il 64% della popolazione pre-bellica.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book is incredible – incredibly bad. Everybody loves this book, and this astounds me. I absolutely hate it. The writing is jumbled, full of nasty depictions and often indecipherable. It is a mixture of history, biography and fiction.

(But my opinion changes by the time I reach the end of the book, so please read on!)

Here is a chapter that plays with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand:

The horses are trotting stolidly and the coach is bobbing steadily, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s eyelids are listlessly sliding down his corneas. The weighty eyelids are about to reach the bottom, but then the horse on the left raises its tail - embarrassingly similar to the tussock on the Archduke’s resplendent helmet – and the Archduke can see the horse’s anus slowly opening, like a camera aperture……The left horse is dropping turds like dark, deflated tennis balls. (page 89)

This is to be found at the beginning of the story entitled the “Accordion”. I don’t find this enjoyable to read. One such description I can take, but repeatedly, over and over, this I find disgusting. I am sure you recognize that the author is playing with the facts, since the Archduke was assassinated traveling in a car. The writing is considered “experimental”. I can do without such experiments.

In a story called “Islands”, a child is speaking:

I went down the stairs and announced my thirst. Aunt Lyudmila walked over to the dark corner on my right-hand side - suddenly the light was ablaze – and there was a concrete box with a large wooden lid. She took off the lid and grabbed a tin cup and shoved her arm into the square. I went to the water tank (for that’s what it really was) and peeked over. I saw a white slug on the opposite wall. I could not tell whether it was moving upward or it was just frozen by our sudden presence. The dew on its back twinkled, and it looked like a severed tongue. I glanced at Aunt Lyudmila, but she didn’t seem to have noticed anything. She offered me the cup, but I shook my head and refused to drink the water which, besides, seemed turbid.

So they brought me a slice of cold watermelon and I drowsily masticated it . (page 8-9)

So tell me, does a nine year old speak with these words: masticated, turbid, “announced my thirst”? Every paragraph, if not every sentence is gruesome. And for what purpose? Just to be “experimental”?

As I mentioned above the writing is jumpy and confusing. What is the point with all this depiction of horrid situations? Why? I see no important message being imparted. Well, everyone else seems to understand, but I do not. I do not enjoy, do not see the point or the important message that is being imparted. So why am I splashing around in this muck?

And then I came to the story, “Blind Jozef & Dead Souls”. This is longer than the others. It could be classified as a novella. This is about an émigré, a young man who has left Bosnia. He has gone to the States and he remains there while the war rages in his home country. He reads of the Siege of Sarajevo of what is happening there to his kin and childhood friends. It is about his emotions, how it feels being separated from home, how it feels in a strange culture, where nothing makes sense, how it is to be a foreigner in a strange land. It is also about how he sees life in the US. It is about where he belongs. Of course his views on life in America are absurdly true and comical at the same time. This is wonderful writing. It shows how it feels to be a refugee. It is amusing and poignant and sad all at the same time. You are still aware that this is the same author of the shorter stories. The reader does recognize the author’s unique style.

I am glad I read the book to the end. I would have to conclude that the author has a distinctive style and in at least one of the stories I empathized, laughed and learned how life as a refuge might feel. I am going to give the book three stars, because I liked that one longer story.

Just a word of warning: don’t expect a smooth comfortable read. Please keep in mind that I don’t even like comforting reads….. I prefer to be grabbed, aroused, upset, moved by the books I read. Such books in fact comfort me by their ability to distract me!

[Draganf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ne piše mi se pa ću samo kratko o uspjesima domaćih pisaca u svijetu.

Hemon je, bez sumnje, najčitaniji živi 'domaći' pisac u bijelom svijetu, što se vidi i po broju čitalaca na Goodreadsu. Naravno, čovjek živi u SAD i piše na engleskom, ali svejedno. E, sad, dok sam čitao ovu knjigu, neprestano mi se motala po glavi jedna za uživanje u knjizi pogubna misao: koliko je ovdje prisutna želja za prilagođavanjem ukusu čitalaca kojima je knjiga namijenjena? Da li se naši pisci na neki način povinuju stranom (u ovom slučaju američkom) pogledu na Balkan i da li igraju ulogu za koju smatraju da im je dodijeljena samim mjestom rođenja? Da ne dužim, kad je Handke dobio Nobelovu nagradu, prvi i najglasniji kritičari su bili upravo ti 'naši' pisci sa stranom reputacijom, mislim na Hemona i Sašu Stanišića. Kao da im je to u opisu posla. Ili, da budem direktniji, kao da bi im se položaj poljuljao kada bi prestali igrati svoje uloge poželjnih i politički korektnih Balkanaca. Pitanje Bruna je u književnom smislu sasvim solidno djelo, dopalo mi se, ali me je sve vrijeme donekle odbijala tematska struktura: red antikomunizma, red srpskih zločina devedesetih, red ruskih zločina tridesetih... i eto književnog djela idealno uklopljenog u dominantne političke i ideološke narative Zapada s kraja vijeka.

Svaka čast Hemonu na fantastičnom uspjehu u svijetu književnosti koji je još veći kad se uzme u obzir da čovjek ne piše na maternjem jeziku. Ali... malo smo se ovdje mimoišli. Nadam se da ćemo se ponovo sresti sljedeći put, planiram uskoro pročitati Projekat Lazarus.

[Alta · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Bosnian who now lives in the States and writes in English, Aleksandar Hemon has been compared to Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and even Hrabal. While these comparisons are, certainly, flattering, it is obvious that they are made simply because these are the cultural references the reviewers or the blurbers associate with the part of the world Hemon comes from. This is a rather pathetic situation that occurs over and over with writers from other parts of the world, especially when their “exoticism” goes beyond Western Europe or Latin America. It seems that in order to place them, American reviewers can only use the token touristy data they have about the writer’s so-called “background,” relegating the writer’s makeup to ethnic picturesqueness.

What makes a writer is less the accident of his birth than the books he’s read. From the very first line of “Islands,” the story opening The Question of Bruno, I was struck by its Proustian echoes: something in the sentences’ rhythm, a melancholy or a hard-to-define longing for a lost world, in spite of its bloody history. My intuition was confirmed 200 pages later by the beginning of the last story, “Imitation of Life”: “For a long time I used to go to bed early”—the exact words that open Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. But Hemon continues, “but then my parents finally bought their first TV set.” This sentence, with its reference to one of the most nostalgic moments in the history of literature (Marcel’s remembrance of the paradise lost of his childhood when his mother used to kiss him good night) is emblematic of Hemon’s tightrope walk between romantic nostalgia and literary parody.

The tone and atmosphere change in the second story, “The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders,” whose irony and dark humor bordering on the absurd represent what one could call an Eastern European sensibility. The story is written in small paragraphs of two to three lines, such as “Alphonse Kauders said: ‘Literature has nothing human in itself. Nor in myself.’” Reading Hemon one can understand that this dark humor and this awareness of the absurd often manifested in a dismantling of language are not gratuitous but are rooted in Eastern Europe’s blood-soaked history. The more insane its history, the more permeated with dark humor it is. One can find this humor in Mikhail Bulgakov’s or Daniil Kharms’s musings on their daily life under the Bolsheviks, as well as in many other writers virtually unknown in this country, who at the turn of the 20th century were writing a literature that was more Kafkaesque than Kafka.

The third in a collection of eight stories, “The Sorge Spy Ring,” is centered on Sorge, a spy the narrator has read about as a child in The Greatest Spies of World War Two. This book may have existed, and Aleksandar Hemon the author (not to be confused with Hemon the character) may have read it; what is certain is that “The Sorge Spy Ring” mixes “real” events with fiction, and uses photos as complementary artifacts for storytelling, as in the books of German writer W.G. Sebald. It also uses footnotes as a sort of parallel story or as a corollary. The text above the footnote describes the “real life” of the Yugoslav little boy fantasizing about Sorge’s adventures and about the possibility that his own father might be a spy, while the text in the footnote is Sorge’s story as described by the “objective,” impersonal voice of the author. A literal representation of day-life versus nightlife or the underground, one might say. “Reality” and fiction are thus two parallel universes that converge when fiction catches up with reality, and the boy’s father is thrown in prison for political reasons.

“Blind Josef Pronek and Dead Souls” (a story whose main character is also the main character in most of the pieces collected and published two years after The Question of Bruno under the title Nowhere Man, with the subtitle “The Pronek Fantasies”) offers a Balzacian solution to Hemon’s two main characters, Pronek and Hemon, by allowing them to cross paths and meet, and thus uniting two separate universes into one encompassing world.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Το διάβασα μέχρι τη μέση, το παράτησα και μετά το ξανάπιασα για να το τελειώσω.
Εν μέρει αυτοβιογραφικό, πλασάρεται ως ένα γράψιμο παρόμοιο μεγάλων συγγραφέων που γεννήθηκαν στην Ανατολική Ευρώπη και μετανάστευσαν στην Αμερική.
Βαρετό έως πολύ βαρετό. Εξαιρείται ίσως το πρώτο διήγημα, με την περιγραφή μιας εκδρομής στο νησάκι Μλιέτ της Κροατίας και αφηγητή ένα παιδάκι.
Δεν βρήκα κάτι το ιδιαίτερο, πλην της νοσταλγίας του μετανάστη και το βάρος του εμφύλιου καταστροφικού πολέμου της Γιουγκοσλαβίας.

[Bobbi · Rating 5 out of 5]

i read this the first semester of my master's program. it was like a key turning in a lock. it completely changed the way i approach writing. the best collection of inter-related short stories i've read. ever.

[Benjamin Fajkovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

En bosnisk-født amerikansk statsborger med serbisk-bosniske & bosnisk-ukrainske rødder formår på 230 sider at sammenstykke samtlige erindrende noveller der fortæller om meget af det sjove, skøre (og til tider relaterbare), sadistiske, forfærdelige, fjogede og fantastiske ved folket i, og myten om, det kæmpe spil klodsmajor der var Jugoslavien.

[Mirela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Books fall open, I fall in.
It does not happen often, though, that I stumble across an author who whacks me off my feet, making me drown in his writing (happily and voluntarily, too). Aleks Hemon did it. It was love on first sight.

Actually Aleksandar Hemon was my friend Masha's recommendation of long ago: now I am furious with myself for such a long delay in this supreme read. Because Hemon practises some seriously expressive writing: rich narration exchanges with humorous, or dark and bitter tones ("Life is nothing if not a succession of evils.") in what seems to me a perfect ballance of some prose of Kafka. His prose is compared to Nabokov's as well, yet Hemon has more sense of (dark) humor, reminding me slightly of the original absurdists. Hemon walks with his eyes wide open, refusing to look the other way to anything, stripping what he sees in naked, painful, sorrowfull, hilarious or joyous truths and slapping it all right into your face.

It is in many tiny elements of this book that Hemon evoked my childhood, too, as I grew up in Tito's Yugoslavia as well (Zagreb - Croatia). In a reflection to some of my grown-up memories evoked by the novel titled "A Coin":
My friend's name was Tarik. Tarik escaped from Sarajevo during the war. Once he got settled in Zagreb (God knows who or what introduced us), I started giving him English lessons at my home. He was in his forties I would say (though I never asked), remarkably tall, Steven-Segal looking but much slimmer, very gentlemanly, always neatly shaved, ironed and dressed fully in black, wearing his semi-long straight, brown hair in a low ponnytail. Tarik had few university diplomas, played a piano, had black belt in karate (or some similar fighting sport) and considered himself restrained unless having learnt English (the reason for learning English). My mom loved his calmness, serenity and courtesy so from a pupil he grew into a family friend. Tarik's apartment in Sarajevo was split in two by a granate, but he continued living in it untill fleeding Sarajevo with one suitcase, leaving all his belongings behind. He described how he had to run from one part of the flat to another, avoiding sniper shots. Tarik's description of dodging the bullets while going out for some food, trying to reach from point A to point B was similar to Hemon's. Hemon wrote: "On days when snipers are particularly rabid, there are scattered bodies as well." Tarik described it to us many years ago. Handfull of heartbreaking stories, sufficient for thousand lifetimes. What those people had gone through in the war noone can imagine... Tarik's lessons ceased some time back in 1995 or 1996 and I have not heard of him since. Whenever there is a Steven Segal's movie on TV we remember our friend Tarik and pray that he is ok, somewhere.

Back to Hemon: The "chucknorrisingly" narrated character of Alphonse Kauders is definity my favourite. Theatre of absurd culminates largely in this surrealistic "hero". Who really hated horses. Oh, how Alphonse Kauders hated horses. :-)

To cut short: don't hesitate - locate the book, grab and feast, being prepared for some true, bitter/sweet sentiments.

[Onur Yz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aslında sıcağı sıcağına yorumlayabilseydim çok iyi olacaktı zira Zambra'nın şu an okumakta olduğum kitabındaki bir tespiti ile ilişkilendirecektim, ama yorum yazma isteği (hemen herkes gibi) daima canlı kalan bir şey değil, daha sonra yazarım deyince ve işin içine günlük rutinler, can sıkıcı olaylar girince kafamda yazmayı planladığım bu kısım buharlaştı gitti. Neyse ki kitabın bölümlerine dair aldığım notlar duruyor. Yeni kazandığım bir alışkanlık olarak ilk faydasını görmüş oluyorum, aksi halde okudum+puanla şeklinde pas geçeceğim bir eser olacaktı.

En baştan söyleyeyim, bu sene okuduğum en enteresan, en farklı, en sıradışı eser. Bunun en önemli nedeni de bölümlere ayrılmış kitabın her bölümde çok farklı yönlere savrulması. Hem de çok sıradışı bir şekilde. İlk bölüm öylesine etkileyici idi, kitabın tamamının böyle devam edeceği yanılgısına kapıldım. Bu kısımda Proust öykünmesi çok güçlüydü. Romantik geçmiş ve edebi mizahın harmanlanması da dikkat çekiciydi.

İkinci kısım ise çok sert bir dümen kıvırma. Bu tür sert dönüşlere (benim gibi) alışkın olmayan okur için çok şaşırtıcı, afallatıcı bir yaklaşım. Bu kısımda kara mizah, ironi ve yoğun absürdlük içeren bir atmosfere geçiyoruz. Doğu Avrupa sinemasına çok aşina olmama rağmen Doğu Avrupa edebiyatına son dönemde ilgi duymaya ve okumaya başladım. Ama bu coğrafya sinemasının bahsettiğim özelliklerini bu eserde gözlemledim. İkisine de aşina olmayan bir okur için etkinin çok sarsıcı olacağını düşünüyorum. Ve çok eğlendiğim bir kısım oldu bu bölüm. "Alphonse Kauders'in yaşamı ve eserleri" isimli bu bölümü 3 kez okudum ve her seferinde aşırı derecede eğlendim. Kara mizah, ironi ve yoğun absürdlük seven okurların müthiş keyif alacağı bir bölüm. Birkaç örnek vermek isterdim ama okuma keyfinizi baltalamak istemem. Bu bölümün sonunda genişçe bir açıklama bölümü mevcut. Bu bölüme katkısı vardır illa ki ama bu bölümü bitirdikten sonra bu aşırı ciddi açıklama kısmı keyif verici değil ama tarihsel bilgisi zayıf okuru bilgilendirici nitelikte, ben verilen bilgilerin çoğunu biliyordum zaten.

Üçüncü bölüm ise kurgu ile gerçek olayların bir karışımı olarak görünüyor. Bir takım eski fotoğraflar tamamlayıcı unsurlar olarak kullanılmış. Keza dipnotların fantastik bir katkısı olduğunu söyleyebiliriz. Yani okuru bilgilendirici değil de hikayeyi zenginleştirici bir unsur olarak varlar. Gerçeklik ile kurgunun birbirine teğet geçtiği ve arada bir kesiştiği kısımlar için daha derin okumalar gerektiğini düşünüyorum. Bu bölüm bana ağır geldi açıkçası.

Son bölüm ise karakterin ABD'deki yaşamından hayli gerçekçi gözlemler içeriyor. Ve bu bölümün en çarpıcı yanı diğer kısımlardaki iki karakterin bir araya geldiği bir bölüm. Bu da hem eserin bütünlüğünü sağlıyor hem de yazarın usta bir kalem olduğunun altını çiziyor.

Aleksandar Hemon'un dilimize kazandırılan başka eserleri de mevcut. "Aşk ve Engeller", "Hayatlarımın Kitabı", "Lazarus Projesi" gibi. Bakalım Hemon'un bu eserleri ile yolum kesişecek mi?

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing grabbed me from page one: there is a real rhythm to it, and the description is beautiful. The first story in the collection is the sort of "lazy childhood summer holiday" tale that you expect to be idyllic, until the writer throws in really gruesome details, like a dog killing a mongoose, dead fish caught in hooks, a tourist vomiting in the sea, a dead bee swirling in the boy's coffee, etc., etc. Then old Uncle Julius, who smells of pine cologne with a whiff of rot and decay, starts telling stories about his time in Soviet gulags. Then they get home to find the plants have all died because the neighbour who was supposed to water them died of a heart attack. And the near-starved family cat now looks at them with irreversible hatred.

So the tone is set. The stories are all separate but interlinked: images like the starving cat and details like the family's history of bee-keeping recur later and remind you of the earlier stories. Much of the book seems autobiographical, as it ties up with known events in Hemon's life: he really did leave Sarajevo for America in the early 90s, just before the siege started. So despite the apparent randomness of the stories and wide variation of writing style, the book is coherent. Hemon, however, plays with fact and fiction, leaving you unsure what, if anything, is true. In the story that struck me as most likely to be heavily autobiographical, Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls, Hemon's character is called Pronek, and Hemon makes a minor appearance as a Dominican immigrant who wants to play soccer. A "Herr Alexander Hemon" also appears briefly in one of the lengthy footnotes to the Sorge Spy Ring as a researcher at the German Foreign Office Archives.

The overall effect reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges, a writer I admire a lot. There's a sense of knowledge accumulating not logically but gradually, through the recurring images and symbols and the threads of stories running through each piece, even though individual facts themselves are distorted and played with. The contrast of the horrors of Sarajevo and the triviality of life in Chicago is handled very well, by focusing on the guilt of the narrator who has escaped, rather than adopting an accusatory tone of which Americans, I'm sure, are tired. The contrasts between a family dodging sniper fire in Sarajevo and a man in a Chicago restaurant demanding romaine lettuce instead of iceberg lettuce on his Turkey Dijon are striking enough and don't need to be laboured. Thankfully Hemon doesn't labour anything. His prose skips quickly on, letting the images speak for themselves.

Not everything worked - sometimes the similes were piled on too thick and sometimes they just didn't work for me (how can pot plants on a step look like "servants with candles"?). And I didn't see the point of the story The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders at all. But overall I loved the book, and definitely want to read his latest, The Lazarus Project, as soon as I can.

[Guillermo Jiménez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Espléndido libro. Relatos y una novella. Horror y humor muy oscuro, muy denso. Es una traducción al español de un libro originalmente escrito en inglés por un autor de origen bosnio. Y a pesar de ello se siente lo eslavo en cada una de sus páginas, de su lenguaje, de lo que observan sus personajes.

Hemon (1964) nos da ocho lados de una figura geométrica de más o de menos lados. Es difícil saberlo, pero da ocho relatos. Siete en realidad y una tremenda novella.

Uno se zambulle en un lenguaje precioso en cada uno de los textos. Un lenguaje bien cuidado, bien esculpido, como una escultura de Rodin en que hay partes bien detallas y acabadas y otras no tanto.
Otras, aparentemente en bruto, con descuido.

Uno así va leyendo a personajes que hablan mal, que hablan en una lengua que no es la suya, en ocasiones en tierras que no les pertenecen o en el aire. En un espacio en un departamento que en realidad no tiene suelo.

La distancia y el peso que puede tener algo como las noticias en el televisor. La radio y el cine como “imitación a la vida”, como un lenguaje del cual nos valemos para crecer, para reconocernos y reconocer al otro.

Hay una sutiliza en la prosa de Hemon, unos guiños bien mesurados al lector, un planteamiento literario cabal y extraño, pero consistente en cada pieza.

Extraordinario.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dread the fact that my life is always slower than death and I have been chosen, despite my weakness, against my will, to witness the discrepancy.

Marvelous prose; dark stories with a comedic edge. It's almost impossible to believe that he moved to Chicago with a marginal grasp of English and then, a few years later, published a work with this much style and sophistication in his newly learned language.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

The context of discovery tends to set one's expectations. Hemon's name is mentioned on the back of Stories in the Worst Way right between DFW and Marcus. I can't say it belongs there. Had the last two stores come first, I might think otherwise, but as it is the book begins as a dry, tedious slough with a few scattered lyrical reprieves. Perhaps my expectations were too grandiose, and it's not Hemon's fault I decided to read him immediately after Notable American Women, an undesirable fate for almost anyone, but yet another regrettable coincidence casts a pall here: his writing and his life are splinters of the Slavic turmoil in the late 20th century, very much akin to the dismaying The Ministry of Pain, except where she attempted a flippant, slang tone, Hemon strives to summon the bio-historico-philosophical solemnity of Sebald. It gets off to a bad start, but "Blind Josef Pronek" is genuinely remarkable.

[Avital · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent story collection, imaginative, real, funny and heartbreaking, sometimes separately and sometimes all at the same time.
Islands is like a flash collection-a sensitive boy absorbs the funny and the horrible, watching and listening to his family.
The Life and work of Alphonse Kauders deals with the grotesque aspect of power.
The Sorge Spy Ring is a two-line story related to spies, the historical and the personal, the factual and the imagined. The touching points exist on every page and yet each story has its own merit.
A Coin is harrowing: the way people move from point A to B under the eyes of snipers.
I won't go through all...Or maybe later, or perhaps after i reared them.
I'll just add that the one about the family gathering is hilarious.
Hemon speaks again and again about war and being an immigrant, grief, absurd, and danger-and it's a whole world to write about.

[Ben Jaques-Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been working my way through Hemon for the past year and a half and this very well be my favorite book of his. Beginning to end, it isn't as complete and satisfying as The Lazarus Project, but some stories are more beautifully written and compelling than even the wonderful novel. "A Coin" has to be one of my favorite short stories that I've ever read. In addition, as a collection of short stories, it is much better than Love and Obstacles, which is also great. The Question of Bruno is excellent.

[maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first encountered the name Aleksandar Hemon, I assumed he was related in some way to Louis Hemon, who wrote a seminal novel about Quebec in which the protagonist is defeated by the Canadian winter. This misapprehension fits well into "Exchange of Pleasant Words", a mock-epic tale about a Bosnian family that manages to trace its heritage back to Homer.

I thrilled to Hemon's postmodern interweaving of fact and fiction in the short stories "The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders", "The Sorge Spy Ring" and "The Accordion". I felt each of the indignities inflicted on the protagonist in "Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls". I kick myself for not having discovered this writer sooner.

[Maura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aleksander Hemon is a Sarajevan who came to Chicago as a tourist (speaking little English) in 1992 when the siege of Sarajevo began, and so he didn't go back. And then, less than ten years after he arrived, he published this book of short stories in more beautiful English than I could ever hope to write. There's a passage in "A Coin" describing how best to get from point A to point B when you know you're in view of a sniper that made me feel sick for a week (which is a good thing).

[Barak · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dunno why, but this one I found to be too patchy and disoriented.
Too experimental to my taste.

I much preferred the other two I have read by this author, The Book of My Lives and Nowhere Man.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

What was in the picture was what was not in the picture, the pictures recorded the very end of the process of disappearing. p128

No question in my mind, Aleksander Hemon is a brilliant writer; I'm not so sure about Bruno and his fleeting appearance. These are more than connected stories. They are layered strategically, each story imprinting on the others.

At least that is what this reader has concluded, although I have to wonder why a few of the stories were included at all. I abandoned two of them with relief but the overall effect is bleakish.

He was never entirely present in his own life, because he thought, without really thinking-that it would last forever. p183

We're not in love, that's out of the question. Nobody's in love in this godforsaken city. p125

3.5 upped to 4 for GR
4/7

[Ivan Lundström]

Älskade, och träffade författaren😍

[apihova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prva in predzadnja zgodba: 5/5

[Chris Blocker · Rating 4 out of 5]

The one thing I have most appreciated about Hemon’s writing is his uncanny ability to somehow twist English words and phrases into a way which shows he doesn’t quite grasp English the way a native speak would, yet has a mastery of the language that far exceeds my own. For those who are not familiar with Hemon’s story, let me quickly say that Hemon had only a basic understanding of English when war stranded him in the United States at the age of 27. Within eight years, Hemon had written his first book in English, The Question of Bruno, a collection of short stories. This collection shows a fluency that my own writing lacks. Hemon’s writing is breathtaking.

Being a collection of Hemon’s earliest writings in English, I expected The Question of Bruno to parade some of Hemon’s most absurdly enjoyable turns of phrase. There is a cadence in what I’ve read of Hemon that is beautiful and unusual, a device that perhaps only a native-native speaker could use so effectively. Yet, I missed that in this collection. Perhaps I’m way too lazy or I’ve grown too familiar with Hemon’s style of writing and didn’t notice, or maybe early editors were quick to point out the “flaws” of Hemon’s English (“You can’t do that!”) Whatever the reason, The Question of Bruno didn’t resonate the same way with me. That’s not to say the collection isn’t stellar and certainly well-written—it is—but it lacks a certain musicality that I greatly anticipated.

Of the Hemon I’ve read so far, I will say each book has it stellar moments and traits, but that none have quite come together for a book that knocks me off my feet. The thing is, however, I believe Hemon has the ability to do it. Either I have yet to read that book, or he hasn’t written it quite yet. It’s in there though. And one day, hopefully soon, Hemon’s going to whip out an award winner that will catch the attention of the people.

[Robert Jacoby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reader beware: this is not your normal short story collection. There's not one traditional "short story" with a beginning, a middle, and an end. They're a mix of slice-of-life and vignette. This can work to great effect in the hands of, say, Victoria Lancelotta in Here in This World. In Hemon's collection, the writing is interesting and curious, even startling, in spots, because he is not a native English speaker. (He gives a couple of nods in the text to his literary hero Joseph Conrad.) Sometimes this unusual phrasing is quite awkward, though, Pynchon-like, and most of the "short stories" as I was reading them felt like a long march, like I had to force my way through them to finish them, because there's no arc of narrative, no tension, nothing pulling me along to read to the end, to make me *want* to get to the end. The Sorge Spy Ring is one of those stories. I almost gave up reading the entire book trying to get through this one. But I'm glad I persevered. The final story, Imitation of Life, reads like a delicate musical composition.

As a whole, the stilted language and drudgery are a 1, the marvelous passages of prose scattered throughout are a 5.

It's okay
2/5 Goodreads
3/5 Amazon

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the lunch, everyone became drowsy, descending from the mountains of meat to the lowlands of sleep. Snippets of conversation died off within instants, for no one's blood was capable of reaching the brain. [...] Finally, everything yielded to the stupor, and excited flies could land, after a long journey, on the continent abundant with meat and salad. They would comfortably sit on a slice of bread, greasing themselves to dazzling summer-fly glitter. Abruptly they would ascend, as if to check whether they could still fly. They would go down gain, buzzing messages of festive pleasure to each other. [p107]

He roved all over the airport, imagining that it had the shape of John Kennedy's supine body, with his legs and arms outstretched, and leech-like airplanes sucking its toes and fingers. He imagined traveling through Kennedy's digestive system, swimming in a bubbling river of acid, like bacteria, and ending up in his gurgling kidney-bathroom. He stepped out of the airport through one of JFK's nostrils, in front of which there were cabs lined up like a thin mustache. [p140]

[Erma Odrach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian born in 1964 who in 1992 came to live in Chicago. With a base understanding of English, by the year 2000 he went on to write The Question of Bruno in English. His style is engaging and quite polished, and when reading, one can't help think that somehow his editor played a more than vital role (in this case, his wife, Lisa Stodder). I liked most of the stories equally, but my favorite was 'The Coin', where events in Sarajevo are vivdly and horrifically depicted. From a political and historical aspect, this book should not be overlooked. I wonder if Hemon has translated any of his stories into Serbian/Croatian?

[Irena · Rating 3 out of 5]

p. 26: "I hate people, almost as much as horses, because there are always too many of them around, and because they kill bees, and because they fart and stink, and because they always come up with something, and it is the worst when they come up with irksome revolutions."

p.89: The horses are trotting stolidly, and the coach is bobbing steadily, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand's eyelids are listlessly sliding down his corneas. The weighty eyelids are about to reach the bottom, but then the horse on the left raises its tail - embarrassingly similar to the tassel on the Archduke's resplendent helmet - and the Archduke can see the horse's anus slowly opening, like a camera aperture."

[Stella · Rating 2 out of 5]

Listened to the audiobook. I think I like this author when he is funny - he has a wonderfully dry sense of humor. The stories about the war and the immigrant experience are spot on and very insightful, but quite heavy - not exactly relaxing, feel-good reading. I also did not find the writing in this one as sharp as in his other book I read.

[Roni · Rating 2 out of 5]

Be careful if you buy a book after reading just the first few pages, because the first story is nothing like the rest. I liked the first story, but the other stories were written in a detached way that didn't appeal to me as much.

[Baris Balcioglu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was recommended by Nurşah I guess. Don't remember anything!

[Stephen Gallup · Rating 3 out of 5]

As in Hemon's Nowhere Man, which I read quite recently, this book toys with the character's quasi-paranoid (or perhaps fatalistic) sensation of being observed, watched, or even spied upon. At one point he actually invites the reader to assume the role (which, obviously, the reader is already doing in a sense). More accurately, the invitation is to "peek over my shoulder, follow my gaze. I want the camera to focus on the objects that I am about to uncover."

In another segment (this is a collection of eight somewhat autobiographical depictions of different stages in his life), there is an intermediary between the character and the reader. For example, after an opening scenario involving the character getting his passport stamped, this new voice steps in to say, "What we have just seen is Jozef Pronek entering the United States of America. It was January 26, 1992. Once he found himself on this side, he didn't feel anything different." Jozef's misadventures in the New World proceed, but that körperlose mensch (i.e., bodyless person) remains on hand to offer us nuggets of information or trivia not known by the new immigrant, and even to contradict statements made by other characters.

I think the effect of this extra presence is to create an ironic detachment, perhaps to blunt the author's pain in dealing with the material. When the war back home subsides and he can finally return to Bosnia to check on his parents, the narrator says, "Presently, we will give him his voice back and let him talk for himself," but since Jozef has reverted to his native language all we get is the narrator's italicized translation.

Devices that add distance are not conducive to drama, but again the point seems to be that this is a difficult subject to be writing about. I believe these pieces were among Hemon's earliest published works. His later books orbit the same general history perhaps more effectively. But there's no significant duplication. Somehow, the story is different in each book.

What I particularly admire about this author are his use of analogies and the imagery he can evoke with them, as in this description of a family reunion in the old country: 

"We have images, recorded on video, of the crowd in the tent, milling in a perpetual attempt to get closer to each other, like atoms forced to form a molecule, as everyone merged into one big body, with moist armpits and indestructible vocal chords."

When he arrives in Chicago on an airplane, he sees "a person with two yellow sticks waving at the plane, as if mesmerizing a dragon." And then in the terminal a lady friend "offered him her right cheek and her upper body attached to it, while keeping her lower body a couple of feet away, as if a contact between their pelvises would ignite a ferocious intercourse."

Aleksander Hemon's ability to write so well would be notable even if it were not in a second language.